My first encounter with the world of learning took place, if family account is to be believed, when I entered kindergarten in Scarsdale, New York. To break the ice among the little strangers, my teacher, Miss Howl, asked her pupils to volunteer a song. I gladly offered a German one, called “Morgenrot.” It was a rather gloomy number that I had learned at home, about a soldier fatalistically contemplating his death in battle at dawn. The year was 1919, and America’s hatred of the Hun still ran strong. Miss Howl was outraged at my performance. She took what she called her “little enemy” by the hand and marched him off to the principal’s office. That wise administrator resolved in my interest the problems of politics and the academy. She promoted me at once to the first grade under Mrs. Beyer, a fine teacher who expected me to work but not to sing. Was this episode a portent of my life in the halls of learning? Hardly. But it was my unwitting introduction to the interaction of culture and politics, my later field of scholarly interest. When I taught European intellectual history at Berkeley in the early 1960s,I devoted a portion of my course to the way in which the same cultural materials were put to different uses in different national societies. One day, I gave a lecture on William Morris and Richard Wagner. The intellectual journeys of these two quite dissimilar artist-thinkers involved stops at many of the same cultural stations. Morris began by using Arthurian legend to champion a religion of beauty, then became an enthusiast for Norse mythology and folk art, and ended a socialist. Wagner traversed much the same itinerary as Morris, but in the reverse direction, starting as a social radical, then reworking Nordic sagas, and ending, with the Arthurian hero Parsifal, in a pseudoreligion of art. In the midst of delivering my lecture, I suddenly saw before me a picture from my childhood that I thought to be by Morris.
Las brujas y la mitología vasca en El guardián invisible de Fernando González Molina: de la tradición oral al lenguaje cinematográfico
